Quotes on compliance and resistance
Quoted in Edexcel GCSE History B Schools History Project: Life in Germany by Steve Waugh, Pearson Education 2009, p.65:
From a study of opposition to the Third Reich written by M. Housden in 1994:
'In the Third Reich, a person needed courage just to say "hello" to someone in the street wearing a yellow star. For that reason we must be careful not to undervalue the achievements of anyone who did anything, no matter how small... [W]e need to maintain a sense of proportion... While many Germans remained at odds with the Third Reich, only a few exceptional souls, driven by a mixture of bravery and despair, dared express themselves openly. But then, how many of us, today, under similar circumstances, would be different?'
From The Nazis: A Warning From History by Laurence Rees, BBC Books, 2005
p10
"I'd expected... to meet countless former Nazis who would say, 'I only committed war crimes because I was acting under orders.' However, when a former Nazi perpetrator was pressed on why he did what he did, his most likely response was: 'I thought it was the right thing to do at the time.' It was a much more terrifying answer than the trite and self-serving one I'd been expecting. These former Nazis believed that their support of Hitler had essentially been a rational response to the situation around them. They told of how they had felt humiliated by the Versailles Treaty at the end of World War I, and had then had to endure the revolutions and hyper-inflation of the immediate post-war years, followed by the mass unemployment and bankruptcies of the early 1930s. They craved a 'strong man' who would restore national pride and defeat the growing threat of Communism."
p11
"I think in many ways I was naive about human motivation before I started on this project. I used to think that people made important decisions about their lives based on rational, intellectual decisions about their lives based on rational, intellectual behaviour, Instead, the decision to follow Hitler and support him through bad times as well as good was to a large extent an emotional one. And we mustn't think of this as some kind of uniquely 'German' trait. Look at your own life and ask yourself how many of the decisions you make in your life are actually 'rational'... Do you like certain people and dislike others for 'rationale' reasons or 'emotional' ones?"
p.42
Interviewee Johannes Zahn, a distinguised German banker, said:
'You really have to say this today, at the beginning, you couldn't tell whether National Socialism was something good with a few bad side-effects, or something evil with a few good side-effects, you couldn't tell.'
p.49
"On release [from the early concentration camps], former inmates were compelled to sign a paper agreeing never to talk about the experience, on pain of immediate re-entry to the camp. Thus it was possible for Germans to believe, if they wanted to, that concentration camps were 'merely' places designed to shock opponents of the regime into conforming. Since the terror was mostly confined to the Nazi's political opponents, or to Jews, the majority of Germans could watch what Göring called 'the settling of scores' with equanimity [calmly], if not [with] pleasure.'
p.56
"Erna Kranz was a teenager in the 1930s and is now a grandmother living just outside Munich. She remembers the early years of Nazi rule, around 1934, as offering a 'glimmer of hope... not just for the unemployed but for everybody because we all knew that we were downtrodden.' She looked at the effect of Nazi policies on her own family and approved: salaries increased and Germany seemed to have regained a sense of purpose. 'I can only speak for myself,' she emphasized a number of times during our interview, conscious no doubt that her views were not politically correct. 'I thought it was a good time. I liked it. We weren't living in affluence like today but there was order and discipline.' Ask Erna Kranz to compare life today with life in the 1930s under the Nazis and she says, 'I thought it was a better time then. To say this is, of course, taking a risk. But I'll say it anyway.'
p.57-58
"It is vital that people like Erna Kranz speak out, for without their testimony an easier, less troublesome view of Nazism might previal - that the regime oppressed the German population from the very beginning. Academic research shows that Erna Kranz is not unusual in her rosy view of the regime during this period. Over 40per cent of Germans questioned in a research project after the war said they remembered the 1930s as 'good times'" - and that's after the war, when they knew where it all led.
p59
The common view of the Gestapo is that they were everywhere, terrorising the German population into submission. But recent research shows this was not the case. Most GEstapo files were destroyed as the end of the war drew near, but by lucky accident those for the small German town of Würtzburg were not - around 18,000 Gestapo files survived. Professor Robert Gellately (Ontario) was one of the first to work on this archive and he uncovered a very different picture of the Gestapo's power. The Würtzburg Gestapo covered an area with around a million people. There were only 28 Gestapo officials. "The idea that the Gestapo itself was constantly spying on the population is demonstrably a myth. So how was it possible that so few people exercised such control? The simple answer is because the Gestapo received enormous help from ordinary Germans.' - around 80% of all 'crimes' were discovered by ordinary Germans and reported to the Gestapo or the police. And these weren't paid up Nazi members - just ordinary people
p60-61
"Denunciations became a way in which Germans could make their voices heard in a system that had turned away from democracy: you see someone who should be in the army but is not - you denounce them; you hear someone tell a joke about Hitler - you denounce them as well. Denunciations would also be used for personal gain; you want the flat an old Jewish lady lives in - you denounce her; your neighbours irritate you - you denounce them too."
[65]
"Most Germans, of course, would never have come into contact with the Gestapo. If you were law-abiding (in Nazi eyes), you were safe. The terror was rarely arbitrary [based on chance or personal whim], unless you had the misfortune to belong to one of the regime's target groups - beggars, social misfits, Communists or Jews.'
p.72
"In 1938, the same year as Kristallnacht, a grand new Chancellery was built (to a design by Albert Speer) to symbolize the power and authority of Nazi rule. But within its walls Hitler's style of government could still only lead to chaos. According to Dr Günter Lohse, of the German Foreign Office, the basic problem was that Hitler would appoint two people in two separate departments to do relatively similar tasks without making it clear who was working for whom. Then they would fight within themselves. Alternatively, Hitler would issue an instruction and then 'everyone made an institution out of the instruction.' When it came to resolving the inevitable disputes, Hitler rarely made a decision as to the merits of a case or said who was right. He would say to his ministers. 'Now you should sit down together and when you've made up, you can come and see me.'
pp.89-90
"...[F]ew people want to believe they were part of something rotten from the first; but they were. The 'Night of the Long Knives', Dachau and the other concentration camps, the racism and anti-Semitism at the core of Nazi ideology - all were present from the early years. I thought more than once after talking to these people [interviewed while making a TV series] that their travels through Nazism had been like a rocket ride. They had started on the journey because they wanted an exciting new experience. Then, when the rocket went up through the clouds, they grew uneasy. 'That was fun, but now it's time to return,' they would have said. But the rocket did not return. It went on and on into the dark, a bleak and horrible place. 'But I only asked for a rocket ride,' they said at the end of the whole horrific journey. 'I never wanted to go into the dark.' But the rocket was always going into the dark if only they had looked ahead." A Social History of the Third Reich, by Richard Grunberger, Orion Books Ltd, 2005
p.31
“Deep-rooted social and economic anxieties did not find their outlet in abstractions – such as the social system or market mechanism – but in the Jews. The Jews became the embodiment, on a scale unprecedented in history, of every ill besetting state and society in the final stage of the Weimar Republic.”
p.43
“[O]n the high holy days of the Nazi calendar when all house-fronts were expected to be swathed in swastika bunting, local Party functionaries had no need to go round and chivvy backsliders; the rare flat-dweller who omitted to put out flags was invariably scolded by his fellow-tenants for giving ‘their house’ a bad name.”
p.50
“In Sebastian Haffner’s perceptive analysis, the population of Nazi Germany divided into two groups – Nazis and loyal Germans – both of whom supported the regime: the former because they were happy and the latter although they were unhappy… Their misgivings [of the loyal Germans] grew as they witnessed such phenomena as the Kristallnacht pogrom, the shortages of food and consumer goods, the increased industrial and military conscription, the feverish construction of the Westwall. But there were also the tangible, gratifying fruits of the regime’s policy.”
p.62
"Majority attitudes to the regime had never been primarily motivated by terror.The average Nazi citizen did not so much live in a state of terror as in a state of delusion tinged with delirium..."
Nazism 1919-1945 Volume 2 State, Economy and Society 1933-1939 A Documentary Reader, edited by J. Noakes and G. Pridham, University of Exeter Press, 2000
p. 183
‘In practice, this ‘programme’ [Nazism] meant the creation of a society governed by the rules of race, eugenics, social efficiency, and ideological conformity. To be acceptable as a “national comrade” one was required to be of the correct racial type (Aryan), to be hereditarily healthy, to be socially efficient (leistungsfähig), and to be ideologically reliable. If one was unsatisfactory in any of these respects then one was outside the “national community” and subject to the various penalties enforced by the agencies responsible for protecting the national community against biological or ideological corruption.’
p. 185
‘For while relatively few Germans were turned into committed Nazis [10% of the population were Nazi Party members by 1939], the overwhelming majority were reconciled with a regime which satisfied many of their basic needs and in many of its policies reflected their basic values. For although terror, both latent and active, provided a crucial element in the stability of the regime, consent was an equally or even more important foundation for it.’
Part of this due to way Nazis offered jobs and career progression to young men.
P.216
‘In addition to propaganda and indoctrination via the media and the arts, the regime also imposed on the population the obligation to make repeated gestures of conformity. These involved the creation of a new set of rituals and symbols associated with the new regime and the transformation of old ones in accordance with the new values. By obliging people to make gestures of conformity the aim was gradually to undermine any will to resist the new order, to break people’s spirit by the need repeatedly to compromise their principles, and in general to create a kind of symbolic framework through which people would be incorporated into the new ‘national community’.
One main way was to stop saying good day and start using the ‘German Greeting’: Heil Hitler, and to respond in the same way if someone said Heil Hitler to you. In 1935 all state and local authority workers were ordered to give the ‘German greeting’ when in work and were expected to use it out of work as well.
p. 217
The Nazis also brought in a new framework of national celebrations (rituals): with either new events or replacements for old events:
30 January: commemorating Hitler becoming Chanchellor
24 February: the refounding of the Nazi Party in 1925
March = Heroes Remembrance Day (the former National Day of Mourning rebranded)
April 20 = Hitler’s birthday
1 May = National Day of Labour (new version of trad working class celebration)
September = Nuremberg Party Rally
9 November = commemoration of Munich Putsch
‘National comrades would be expect to show respect for such rituals by hanging out flags and attending parades or speeches and their observance of these rituals would be monitored by the local Party Block Warden and their employers. Failure to conform would mark one down as “politically unreliable” which in turn could lead to promotion blocks, exclusion from welfare or other state benefits, dismissal or worse.’
p. 219
‘The most widespread and resented form of compulsory gesture of conformity was the continual collection for the Winter Relief Programme and other Nazi causes.’ The idea was to create a sense of a national community in which everyone made sacrifices to help the community.
p. 220
Noakes and Pridham include an extract from instructions given by the Gauleiter of Gau Hessen-Nassau in 1935:
‘Despite all our education of the public, the Winter Relief Programme is still being to some extent covertly sabotaged. These attempts must be crushed with all means. Open sabotage must be dealt with immediately by the agencies of the Secret State Police, also the Secret State Police must be informed in the case of all covert attempts to damage the Winter Relief Programme. Furthermore, preventive measures must be taken to make it clear to those who maliciously refuse to make contributions to the WHW that through their refusal to support the WHW they are placing themselves outside the national community. Thus, for example, all businesses which receive State or municipal contracts will have those contracts revoked, and people of whom it is known that they do not support the WHW will be excluded from deliveries and contracts from official bodies.’
Quoted in Edexcel GCSE History B Schools History Project: Life in Germany by Steve Waugh, Pearson Education 2009, p.65:
From a study of opposition to the Third Reich written by M. Housden in 1994:
'In the Third Reich, a person needed courage just to say "hello" to someone in the street wearing a yellow star. For that reason we must be careful not to undervalue the achievements of anyone who did anything, no matter how small... [W]e need to maintain a sense of proportion... While many Germans remained at odds with the Third Reich, only a few exceptional souls, driven by a mixture of bravery and despair, dared express themselves openly. But then, how many of us, today, under similar circumstances, would be different?'
From The Nazis: A Warning From History by Laurence Rees, BBC Books, 2005
p10
"I'd expected... to meet countless former Nazis who would say, 'I only committed war crimes because I was acting under orders.' However, when a former Nazi perpetrator was pressed on why he did what he did, his most likely response was: 'I thought it was the right thing to do at the time.' It was a much more terrifying answer than the trite and self-serving one I'd been expecting. These former Nazis believed that their support of Hitler had essentially been a rational response to the situation around them. They told of how they had felt humiliated by the Versailles Treaty at the end of World War I, and had then had to endure the revolutions and hyper-inflation of the immediate post-war years, followed by the mass unemployment and bankruptcies of the early 1930s. They craved a 'strong man' who would restore national pride and defeat the growing threat of Communism."
p11
"I think in many ways I was naive about human motivation before I started on this project. I used to think that people made important decisions about their lives based on rational, intellectual decisions about their lives based on rational, intellectual behaviour, Instead, the decision to follow Hitler and support him through bad times as well as good was to a large extent an emotional one. And we mustn't think of this as some kind of uniquely 'German' trait. Look at your own life and ask yourself how many of the decisions you make in your life are actually 'rational'... Do you like certain people and dislike others for 'rationale' reasons or 'emotional' ones?"
p.42
Interviewee Johannes Zahn, a distinguised German banker, said:
'You really have to say this today, at the beginning, you couldn't tell whether National Socialism was something good with a few bad side-effects, or something evil with a few good side-effects, you couldn't tell.'
p.49
"On release [from the early concentration camps], former inmates were compelled to sign a paper agreeing never to talk about the experience, on pain of immediate re-entry to the camp. Thus it was possible for Germans to believe, if they wanted to, that concentration camps were 'merely' places designed to shock opponents of the regime into conforming. Since the terror was mostly confined to the Nazi's political opponents, or to Jews, the majority of Germans could watch what Göring called 'the settling of scores' with equanimity [calmly], if not [with] pleasure.'
p.56
"Erna Kranz was a teenager in the 1930s and is now a grandmother living just outside Munich. She remembers the early years of Nazi rule, around 1934, as offering a 'glimmer of hope... not just for the unemployed but for everybody because we all knew that we were downtrodden.' She looked at the effect of Nazi policies on her own family and approved: salaries increased and Germany seemed to have regained a sense of purpose. 'I can only speak for myself,' she emphasized a number of times during our interview, conscious no doubt that her views were not politically correct. 'I thought it was a good time. I liked it. We weren't living in affluence like today but there was order and discipline.' Ask Erna Kranz to compare life today with life in the 1930s under the Nazis and she says, 'I thought it was a better time then. To say this is, of course, taking a risk. But I'll say it anyway.'
p.57-58
"It is vital that people like Erna Kranz speak out, for without their testimony an easier, less troublesome view of Nazism might previal - that the regime oppressed the German population from the very beginning. Academic research shows that Erna Kranz is not unusual in her rosy view of the regime during this period. Over 40per cent of Germans questioned in a research project after the war said they remembered the 1930s as 'good times'" - and that's after the war, when they knew where it all led.
p59
The common view of the Gestapo is that they were everywhere, terrorising the German population into submission. But recent research shows this was not the case. Most GEstapo files were destroyed as the end of the war drew near, but by lucky accident those for the small German town of Würtzburg were not - around 18,000 Gestapo files survived. Professor Robert Gellately (Ontario) was one of the first to work on this archive and he uncovered a very different picture of the Gestapo's power. The Würtzburg Gestapo covered an area with around a million people. There were only 28 Gestapo officials. "The idea that the Gestapo itself was constantly spying on the population is demonstrably a myth. So how was it possible that so few people exercised such control? The simple answer is because the Gestapo received enormous help from ordinary Germans.' - around 80% of all 'crimes' were discovered by ordinary Germans and reported to the Gestapo or the police. And these weren't paid up Nazi members - just ordinary people
p60-61
"Denunciations became a way in which Germans could make their voices heard in a system that had turned away from democracy: you see someone who should be in the army but is not - you denounce them; you hear someone tell a joke about Hitler - you denounce them as well. Denunciations would also be used for personal gain; you want the flat an old Jewish lady lives in - you denounce her; your neighbours irritate you - you denounce them too."
[65]
"Most Germans, of course, would never have come into contact with the Gestapo. If you were law-abiding (in Nazi eyes), you were safe. The terror was rarely arbitrary [based on chance or personal whim], unless you had the misfortune to belong to one of the regime's target groups - beggars, social misfits, Communists or Jews.'
p.72
"In 1938, the same year as Kristallnacht, a grand new Chancellery was built (to a design by Albert Speer) to symbolize the power and authority of Nazi rule. But within its walls Hitler's style of government could still only lead to chaos. According to Dr Günter Lohse, of the German Foreign Office, the basic problem was that Hitler would appoint two people in two separate departments to do relatively similar tasks without making it clear who was working for whom. Then they would fight within themselves. Alternatively, Hitler would issue an instruction and then 'everyone made an institution out of the instruction.' When it came to resolving the inevitable disputes, Hitler rarely made a decision as to the merits of a case or said who was right. He would say to his ministers. 'Now you should sit down together and when you've made up, you can come and see me.'
pp.89-90
"...[F]ew people want to believe they were part of something rotten from the first; but they were. The 'Night of the Long Knives', Dachau and the other concentration camps, the racism and anti-Semitism at the core of Nazi ideology - all were present from the early years. I thought more than once after talking to these people [interviewed while making a TV series] that their travels through Nazism had been like a rocket ride. They had started on the journey because they wanted an exciting new experience. Then, when the rocket went up through the clouds, they grew uneasy. 'That was fun, but now it's time to return,' they would have said. But the rocket did not return. It went on and on into the dark, a bleak and horrible place. 'But I only asked for a rocket ride,' they said at the end of the whole horrific journey. 'I never wanted to go into the dark.' But the rocket was always going into the dark if only they had looked ahead."
A Social History of the Third Reich, by Richard Grunberger, Orion Books Ltd, 2005
p.31
“Deep-rooted social and economic anxieties did not find their outlet in abstractions – such as the social system or market mechanism – but in the Jews. The Jews became the embodiment, on a scale unprecedented in history, of every ill besetting state and society in the final stage of the Weimar Republic.”
p.43
“[O]n the high holy days of the Nazi calendar when all house-fronts were expected to be swathed in swastika bunting, local Party functionaries had no need to go round and chivvy backsliders; the rare flat-dweller who omitted to put out flags was invariably scolded by his fellow-tenants for giving ‘their house’ a bad name.”
p.50
“In Sebastian Haffner’s perceptive analysis, the population of Nazi Germany divided into two groups – Nazis and loyal Germans – both of whom supported the regime: the former because they were happy and the latter although they were unhappy… Their misgivings [of the loyal Germans] grew as they witnessed such phenomena as the Kristallnacht pogrom, the shortages of food and consumer goods, the increased industrial and military conscription, the feverish construction of the Westwall. But there were also the tangible, gratifying fruits of the regime’s policy.”
p.62
"Majority attitudes to the regime had never been primarily motivated by terror.The average Nazi citizen did not so much live in a state of terror as in a state of delusion tinged with delirium..."
Nazism 1919-1945 Volume 2 State, Economy and Society 1933-1939 A Documentary Reader, edited by J. Noakes and G. Pridham, University of Exeter Press, 2000
p. 183
‘In practice, this ‘programme’ [Nazism] meant the creation of a society governed by the rules of race, eugenics, social efficiency, and ideological conformity. To be acceptable as a “national comrade” one was required to be of the correct racial type (Aryan), to be hereditarily healthy, to be socially efficient (leistungsfähig), and to be ideologically reliable. If one was unsatisfactory in any of these respects then one was outside the “national community” and subject to the various penalties enforced by the agencies responsible for protecting the national community against biological or ideological corruption.’
p. 185
‘For while relatively few Germans were turned into committed Nazis [10% of the population were Nazi Party members by 1939], the overwhelming majority were reconciled with a regime which satisfied many of their basic needs and in many of its policies reflected their basic values. For although terror, both latent and active, provided a crucial element in the stability of the regime, consent was an equally or even more important foundation for it.’
Part of this due to way Nazis offered jobs and career progression to young men.
P.216
‘In addition to propaganda and indoctrination via the media and the arts, the regime also imposed on the population the obligation to make repeated gestures of conformity. These involved the creation of a new set of rituals and symbols associated with the new regime and the transformation of old ones in accordance with the new values. By obliging people to make gestures of conformity the aim was gradually to undermine any will to resist the new order, to break people’s spirit by the need repeatedly to compromise their principles, and in general to create a kind of symbolic framework through which people would be incorporated into the new ‘national community’.
One main way was to stop saying good day and start using the ‘German Greeting’: Heil Hitler, and to respond in the same way if someone said Heil Hitler to you. In 1935 all state and local authority workers were ordered to give the ‘German greeting’ when in work and were expected to use it out of work as well.
p. 217
The Nazis also brought in a new framework of national celebrations (rituals): with either new events or replacements for old events:
30 January: commemorating Hitler becoming Chanchellor
24 February: the refounding of the Nazi Party in 1925
March = Heroes Remembrance Day (the former National Day of Mourning rebranded)
April 20 = Hitler’s birthday
1 May = National Day of Labour (new version of trad working class celebration)
September = Nuremberg Party Rally
9 November = commemoration of Munich Putsch
‘National comrades would be expect to show respect for such rituals by hanging out flags and attending parades or speeches and their observance of these rituals would be monitored by the local Party Block Warden and their employers. Failure to conform would mark one down as “politically unreliable” which in turn could lead to promotion blocks, exclusion from welfare or other state benefits, dismissal or worse.’
p. 219
‘The most widespread and resented form of compulsory gesture of conformity was the continual collection for the Winter Relief Programme and other Nazi causes.’ The idea was to create a sense of a national community in which everyone made sacrifices to help the community.
p. 220
Noakes and Pridham include an extract from instructions given by the Gauleiter of Gau Hessen-Nassau in 1935:
‘Despite all our education of the public, the Winter Relief Programme is still being to some extent covertly sabotaged. These attempts must be crushed with all means. Open sabotage must be dealt with immediately by the agencies of the Secret State Police, also the Secret State Police must be informed in the case of all covert attempts to damage the Winter Relief Programme. Furthermore, preventive measures must be taken to make it clear to those who maliciously refuse to make contributions to the WHW that through their refusal to support the WHW they are placing themselves outside the national community. Thus, for example, all businesses which receive State or municipal contracts will have those contracts revoked, and people of whom it is known that they do not support the WHW will be excluded from deliveries and contracts from official bodies.’